Cultural studies is concerned with an exploration of culture, as

constituted by the meanings and representations generated by human

signifying practices, and the context in which they occur. Cultural
studies has a particular interest in the relations of power and the
political consequences that are inherent in such cultural practices.
The prime purposes of cultural studies, which is located in the
institutions of universities, publishing houses and bookshops, are the
processes of intellectual clarification that could provide useful tools
for cultural/political activists and policy makers.

Chris Barker, The Sage Dictionary of Cultural Studies (2004)

 Anti-essentialism

This concept alludes to the idea that words do not have referents in an independent
object world that possesses essential or universal qualities. Rather, all categories of
knowledge are discursive constructions that change their meanings according to time,
place and usage. In particular, there can be no truths, subjects or identities outside of
language, which does not itself have stable referents, and thus there are no stable truths
or identities. The ‘objects’ of language are not fixed or universal things but meaningful
descriptions that through social convention come to be ‘what counts as truth’ (that is,
the temporary stabilization of meaning).
 Commodification

The process associated with capitalism by which objects, qualities

and signs are turned into commodities where a commodity is an item whose prime
purpose is sale in the market place. The study of culture has long involved a strand
of thinking critical of the commodification of culture by which the culture industry
turns people and meanings into commodities that serve its interests. Thus, in a
process that Marx called commodity fetishism, the surface appearance of goods sold
in the market place is said to obscure the origins of those commodities in an
exploitative relationship at the level of production.
 Consumption
To consume suggests to use or to ingest. Thus the process of cultural
consumption in capitalist societies concerns the use to which the commodities
that circulate in the market place are put. In particular, consumption in the
context of cultural studies is centered on the generation of meanings in the
process of consumption…
Consumption-oriented cultural studies argues that while the production of
popular music, film, television and fashion is in the hands of transnational
capitalist corporations, meanings are produced, altered and managed at the
level of consumption.
 Counterculture
The idea of a counterculture refers to the values, beliefs and attitudes, that is,
the culture, of a minority group that is in opposition to the mainstream or
ascendant culture. Further, a counterculture is articulate and self-conscious in
its opposition to the values of the governing culture in a way that distinguishes
it from a subculture. The term is particularly associated with the cultural and
political movements and formations of the 1960s and early 1970s in the
United States and Britain, from whence the concept emerged.
 Cultural capital
A concept associated with Pierre Bourdieu, for whom cultural capital acts as
a social relation within a system of exchange that includes the accumulated
cultural knowledge that confers power and status. For example, education
and/or the ability to talk knowledgeably about high culture has traditionally
been a form of cultural capital associated with the middle classes. Cultural
capital is distinguished from economic capital (wealth) and social capital
(whom you know). Here distinctions of cultural taste are understood to be
classifications based on lines of power rather than being founded on either
universal aesthetic criteria or individual choice. Thus taste differentiation is
never simply about differences that are of equal standing but rather entails
claims to authority and authenticity.
 Hegemony
The concept of hegemony played a significant part in the development of
cultural studies and was a core concept of the field during the 1970s and 1980s.
According to this theory, there is a strand of meanings within any given culture that
can be called governing or ascendant. The process of making, maintaining and
reproducing this authoritative set of meanings, ideologies and practices has been
called hegemony.
For Antonio Gramsci, from whom cultural studies appropriated the term, hegemony
implies a situation where a ‘historical bloc’ of ruling class factions exercises social
authority and leadership over the subordinate classes through a combination of
force and, more importantly, consent. Gramscian concepts proved to be of longlasting
significance within cultural studies because of the central importance given
to popular culture as a site of ideological struggle.
 Hybridity
The concept of the hybrid made considerable strides into the vocabulary of
cultural studies during the 1990s in the context of discussions about globalization,
diaspora cultures and postcolonialism. At its core, hybrdity involves the mixing
together of previously discrete cultural elements to create new meanings and
identities. Indeed, the notion of hybridity has played a significant part in
destabilizing the very idea of an unchanging culture that has secure locations since
hybrids destabilize and blur established cultural boundaries in a process of fusion
or creolization. One can make a distinction between structural hybridization that
refers to a variety of social and institutional sites of hybridity, for example border
zones or cities like Miami or Singapore, and cultural hybridization that describes a
range of cultural responses from separation and assimilation to hybrids that
destabilize and blur cultural boundaries.
 Intellectuals
The main concern that cultural studies has had with the idea of an
intellectual is to consider what kind of a cultural and political role they might play.
In a sense, to ask this question is to address what the purpose of cultural studies
itself is as an intellectual project.
In thinking of themselves in ‘organic’ terms, cultural studies writers sought to
play a ‘de-mystifying’ role in the ‘ideological struggle’ by pointing to the
constructed character of cultural texts. They aimed to highlight the myths and
‘ideologies’ embedded in texts in the hope of producing subject positions, and real
subjects, who are enabled to oppose subordination.
 Imagined community
The concept of the ‘imagined community’ is most obviously associated with the
work of Benedict Anderson on the ‘nation’. For Anderson, the nation is an
‘imagined community’ and national identity a construction assembled through
symbols and rituals in relation to territorial and administrative categories.
National identities are intrinsically connected to, and constituted by, forms of
communication. The nation is an imagined community because most of its
members will never know most of the other members and yet they consider
themselves to be a part of the same commonality. Despite their physical
separation, members of a nation often regard themselves as sharing in a
fraternity with which they identify.
 News
The production of news holds a strategic position in debates about the mass
media for its presumed, and often feared, influence on public life. News is not a
reflection of reality so much as ‘the putting together of reality’. That is, news is not
an unmediated ‘window-on-the world’ but a selected and constructed
representation constitutive of ‘reality’. The selection of items for inclusion as news
and the specific ways in which, once selected, a story is constructed are never
neutral. They are always a particular version of events. It follows that news selection
criteria tell us about the ‘world-view’ that is being assembled and disseminated.